Throw more logs on the fire

I was recently having a conversation with a coworker about ways to troubleshoot an automated installation process and describing how to inject further logging into the process.  Instead of running the command line setup.exe, I suggested he run a simple command file (setup.cmd) with something like the following:

@echo off
echo %date% %time% > "%temp%\setup.log"
setup.exe /q
echo %errorlevel% >> "%temp%\setup.log"
echo %date% %time% >> "%temp%\setup.log"

The problem was that setup.exe was not generating its usual log files as it would when successfully executing, so this is a simple way to add additional logging to the process to see a timestamp for when setup.exe was called and when it completed.  (There are obviously many different ways to add further logging, this is just one simple example.) 

The point of this post is that we were standing in the hallway talking about logging and creating more logs.  One of our sales guys walked by and jokingly asked, "throw more logs on the fire?"  We laughed at his misunderstanding of the conversation, but then it occurred to me that this is a great catch phrase for adding more debug logging.

So the next time you're debugging a tough script or piece of automation, shout it out: "throw more logs on the fire!"  You heard it here first.